Sarah and Yaron

I’ve spent the morning along with many of you, thinking about last night’s assassination in Washington. The Lischinskys and the Milgrims are now mourning their children, and we have been cast into sorrow for them and their families, for the death of hope, for the death of possibility.

The terrible irony is that they were no one’s enemy. Yaron Lischinsky was committed to all to right things: understanding, cooperation, overcoming grievance. His work at the Israeli Embassy was an expression of idealism. Like many of his co-workers, he gave his heart to diplomacy, the idea that that there are alternatives to the losses of combat.

Sarah Milgrim grew up in Kansas City, a Midwesterner like us, with our experience of the world. By report, she was an effective student activist, who had lived through the killings at the Jewish Community Center, a naked act of anti-Semitic animus. Eleven years later, she has been swept away, a loss to our community, a loss to the world.

I grieve for both of them, and what can never be. In another week, they would have returned to Jerusalem, where they planned to become officially engaged. After that, marriage and family. All you have to do is look at their faces and you can see that they were intended for lives of service. Not the terrible reality of martyrdom and erasure.

In the days ahead, we will be called on to act, to identify our enemies, to acknowledge our peril, to consider the ways we can ensure our security. Yaron and Sarah remind us that everything hangs by a thread, that in the presumed safety of our capital city, an angry zealot can create a sidewalk catastrophe.

But for the moment, I hope that we can hold all of this in abeyance to mourn for Sarah and Yaron and offer comfort and consolation. There will be time enough to declaim and deplore, to parse the politics of our new situation. Soon enough, they will become symbols and talking points, but for this brief moment, I hope that we can think of them more personally, as the son and daughter of grieving families.

My the memory of the righteous be for a blessing.